A summary of research projects and publications dealing with mosquitoes, wetlands and urban ecology (as well as other Medical Entomology activities) by Dr Cameron Webb (University of Sydney & NSW Health Pathology)

Tag Archives: Our Living River

There is no single answer to one of the most commonly asked questions I’m asked. “How far does a mosquito fly?” Notwithstanding those blown long distances by cyclonic winds or transported in vehicles, the distances travelled by mosquitoes varies greatly from mosquito to mosquito. But how do scientists work it out?

My latest published research demonstrates that Australia’s saltmarsh mosquito (Aedes vigilax) flies many kilometres from urban estuarine wetlands. This has great implications for improving our understanding of their role in outbreaks of mosquito-borne disease as well as designing mosquito control programs.

There are a few different ways you can work out how far mosquitoes fly.

Firstly, given we know that mosquitoes are closely associated with certain habitats, it is sometimes possible to track back collections of mosquitoes to their preferred habitats. For example, knowing a coastal wetlands mosquito is found many kilometres away from the nearest estuarine wetland may indicate it disperses widely.

Secondly, scientists can conducted mark-release-recapture experiments. In these studies, mosquitoes are marked with some kind of substance, released, and then specimens collected in traps operated in a surrounding network can be checked to see how many of those marked mosquitoes have been recaptured and how far they’ve travelled.

In this recently published study, I marked over 200,000 Aedes vigilax with a fluorescent powder (usually used to create paint) and released them close to their larval habitats in estuarine wetlands along the Parramatta River. For the next week, I set dozens of traps around the local area hoping to recollect some of those marked mosquitoes. By scanning the mosquitoes under a UV light, the marked mosquitoes were (relatively) easily identified.

Recapture rates for these types of experiments are notoriously low. While I was only able to recapture less than 1% of those marked mosquitoes released, marked mosquitoes were recaptured many kilometres from their release point. The results demonstrated that these mosquitoes of pest and public health concern disperse so widely from saltmarsh and mangrove habitats that their impacts can be felt quite widely, highlighting the need for targeted mosquito control to minimise potentially widespread pest and public health impacts.

There is an important implication here for current “mosquito aware” urban planning strategies. The incorporation of “buffer zones” between residential developments and mosquito habitats is often proposed but this research clearly demonstrated that this strategy just isn’t practical when it comes to saltmarsh mosquitoes. They just fly too far!

While this study demonstrated marked mosquitoes were travelling up to 3km, other work I’ve done has highlighted how differently the dispersal ranges of mosquitoes can be. In a study of yellow fever mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) in far north QLD, we found marked mosquitoes were only traveling between 100-200m. Similarly, other work with Australian backyard mosquitoes (e.g. Aedes notoscriptus) has shown they don’t fly more than 200m. That’s still enough to fly over from your neighbour’s backyard full of mosquito breeding opportunities.

There is a practical application to this work for the management of dengue in far north QLD. Knowing that the mosquitoes involved in transmission are flying less than 200m, mosquito surveillance and control can be concentrated around the homes of those infected individuals. A great example of how understanding mosquito biology can better inform cost-effective response strategies.

There is still plenty to learn about the dispersal of mosquitoes in Australia. I’ve got some ideas so if you’re looking for a research projects, get in touch!

Aedes vigilax (Skuse) is a pest and vector species associated with coastal wetlands and the abundance of this mosquito has been identified as contributing to increased risk of mosquito-borne disease outbreaks. As urban development continues to encroach on these coastal wetlands, pest and public health impacts are becoming of increasing concern and in the absence of broadscale mosquito control. Urban planners are looking to buffer zones and other land use planning options to minimize contact between mosquitoes and humans but gaps in the understanding of dispersal ranges of mosquitoes hamper the adoption of these strategies. A mark-release-recapture experiment was conducted to measure the dispersal of this mosquito from an urban estuarine wetland in Sydney, Australia. An estimated total of over 150,000 wild caught female mosquitoes were marked with fluorescent dust and then released. A network of 38 traps was then operated for 5 d within an area of 28 km2. A total of 280 marked mosquitoes was recaptured, representing less than 1% of the estimate 250,000 marked mosquitoes released. Marked mosquitoes were recaptured up to 3 km from the release point, providing an insight into the dispersal range of these mosquitoes. The mean distance traveled by marked mosquitoes was 0.83 km, a result reflecting the greater proportion of marked mosquitoes recaptured near release point. The findings of this study indicate that effective buffer zones between estuarine wetlands and high-density urban developments would be an impractical approach to minimizing pest and public health impacts associated with this mosquito.

Join the conversation on Twitter or check out some of the other articles I’ve written on mosquitoes and other biting insects at The Conversation. You can also learn more about Australia’s wonderful mosquitoes in the award winning field guide available from CSIRO Publishing.

Ask a dog owner why they let their pets chase shorebirds across the local mudflats and the response will usually be “Don’t worry, they never catch ‘em”. But dogs don’t have to catch the birds to have a serious impact on them, especially when they’re chasing them off wetlands full of mud dwelling invertebrates that the birds love munching on.

Perhaps if the community was more aware of how vulnerable the shorebirds are, maybe they’d be more likely to keep their dogs on a leash, off the local mudflats and the birds could feed in peace. But how can we get the message across to local residents?

A global traveller and annual visitor to local wetlands

The Bar-tailed Godwit, Limosa lapponica, is a migratory bird that flies all the way from Alaska to feed in Australia’s coastal wetlands each summer. A medium sized brown and white bird with a distinctively long upturned bill, the Bar-tailed Godwits are commonly seen feeding on aquatic insects and molluscs along the muddy foreshore of Sydney’s Parramatta River. They’ve become an iconic bird of the region, even featuring as one of the “mascots” of the “Our Living River”, an initiative to improve the health of the Parramatta River.

Each spring they make the trip from the Arctic to Australia (non-stop flight around 11,000km has been recorded!) but to make the long flight back to Alaska, the Bar-tailed Godwits rely on finding enough food among the wetlands during their time along the river. The birds are commonly seen from spring to early autumn, often in flocks of a dozen or more, foraging in local mudflats. But their habitats are under constant threat from pollution and the encroachment of mangroves.

One location where the birds are commonly seen is Hen and Chicken Bay in the City of Canada Bay Council local government area. The suburbs of Abbotsford, Wareemba and Five Dock are nearby and the foreshore pathways and parklands are popular locations for exercise and recreation by both residents and visitors (please check out my favourite cafe, The Cove Dining Co, when you’re next visiting).

Unfortunately, the ever increasing human population, together with the easy access to the foreshore, brings threats to the Bar-tailed Godwits and their habitats.

People, pets and wildlife conservation

The Bar-tailed Godwits are quite tolerant of people. They’re happy to keep feeding while people and pets walk past. It provides a wonderful opportunity for the community to see these unique global travellers up close.

They have a tough time though when constantly chased by dogs or disturbed by people. Many times I’ve seen dogs running along the low tide shoreline, no doubt it is fun for both the pet and their owner. I have no doubt there is complete ignorance of the unintended consequences and that this may be a problem for the birds.

Reducing the impact of dogs on shorebirds is an issue faced by authorities around Australia as well as overseas. Beyond wetland habitats, studies have also shown dog walkers can have a negative impact on bushland birds too.

Putting a fence up around the wetlands isn’t a solution. The use of buffers is impractical and nobody wants to start setting traps or baits to stop the dogs. What else could be tried?

Illustration and wildlife conservation

Inspired by a project in Ku-Ring-Gai Council where school students drew signs encouraging dog owners to pick up after their pets, a similar approach was proposed for Hen and Chicken Bay. Could signs featuring the artwork of local students help get the message across?

Jointly funded by the Abbotsford Public School Parents and Citizens Association, and City of Canada Bay Council (Council’s Bushcare Department contributed funds in additional to a Canada Bay Community Grant), a series of educational signs were installed along the foreshore pathway of Hen and Chicken Bay as well as nearby Henry Lawson Park and Halliday Park.

When trying to decide on the design of the signs, it was important that there was some community ownership of the messages, they were aesthetically pleasing and lacked a serious authoritarian tone.

A competition was launched among students at Abbotsford Public School to draw Bar-tailed Godwits, one illustration was selected from each grade to be showcased on the signs. While the student’s drawing may not have been taxonomically accurate, they certainly reflected the great enthusiasm for the birds and this conservation process.

The school itself was wonderful and a component of the curriculum involved the students learning about the Bar-tailed Godwits and the importance of local wetlands. A local author, Jeannie Baker, had recently published the wonderful children’s book “Circle”, and a copy was purchased for almost every classroom and became a reference point for learning about the birds and their amazing global migratory journal to the local wetlands each year. Directly involving the students not only yielded some wonderful illustrations to personalise the signs but it also engaged the broader school community and assisted raising the profile of the project.

Along with an unique illustration on each sign, the key messages promoted were that the Bar-tailed Godwits visits the local mudflats from the Northern Hemisphere each year between August and April and to please don’t allow your dog onto the mudflats and please don’t allow off-leash dogs to chase birds. Dog owners were also directed towards to local off leash area in a nearby park.

An attitudinal study of dog owners in Victoria, Australia found that “Dog owners were more likely to feel obliged to leash their dog when they believed other people expected dogs to be leashed, and when they believed their dog was a threat to wildlife or people.” While this study was associated with beach-nesting birds, perhaps a similar attitude exists among those dog owners prone to allowing their dogs to run across bird-filled mudflat?

The signs were unveiled at an official launch in December 2016 by the Mayor of Canada Bay Council, Helen McCaffrey, and in attendance were representatives of Birdlife Australia, Our Living River and dozens of Abbotsford Public School students. Judy Harrington, Sydney Olympic Park Authority, kindly gave a talk to students on the day about the Bar-tailed Godwits and in the shadow of an approaching summer storm, a class alongside the local wetlands was a wonderful way to launch a novel and engaging project of environmental conservation.

Got any other ideas about how we can protect our local wetlands wildlife? Join the conversation on Twitter!

This is a special guest post from Dr Suzi Claflin. Suzi found herself in Sydney, Australia, (via Cornell University, USA) in 2015 to undertake a research project investigating the role of urban landscapes in determining mosquito communities associated with urban mangroves. She was kind enough to put this post together to celebrate the publication of our research in Wetlands Ecology and Management!

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Sometimes you’ve got to make hard choices for the greater good. These situations can arise anywhere, but here – as usual – we are concerned with mosquitoes. There’s a balancing act carried out by public health officials and wetland managers trying to both preserve endangered habitat and protect human health. In this guest post, I’ll explain the science behind research I recently published in collaboration with Dr Cameron Webb, and suggest one way forward for addressing human and environmental health concerns in urban wetlands.

During my PhD, I studied how the landscape surrounding small-scale farms affects the spread of a crop virus and the community of insect pests that carry it. When I came to Australia to work with Cameron, I was surprised to find myself applying the same type of landscape ecology to mosquitoes and mangroves in urban Sydney.

The misfortune of mangroves

Mangroves are real team players. They provide a range of services to the surrounding ecosystem and to the humans lucky enough to live near them. Mangroves are extremely effective at protecting the shoreline (but this can sometimes be a problem). They prevent erosion by gripping the soil in their complex root systems and buffer the beach by serving as a wave break. By filtering sediment out of the water that flows over them, mangroves also prevent their neighbouring ecosystems, such as coral reefs and seagrass forests, from being smothered.

Despite all their good work, mangroves have an almost fatal flaw; they prefer waterfront property. Unfortunately for them, so do humans. Urban and agricultural development has eaten away at mangroves, leaving them highly endangered.

The mosquito menace

Mozzies are a public health menace, because they spread human diseases like Ross River virus (RRV). Because of this, public health officials rightly spend time considering how to supress mosquito populations in order to reduce the risk of disease transmission.

Here’s where things get tricky: mangroves are great for mosquitoes.

That leaves public health officials and wetland managers in a difficult position. On the one hand, mangroves are delicate, at-risk ecosystems that need to be preserved. On the other, mangroves and surrounding habitats potentially harbor both the animal carriers of the RRV (e.g. wallabies) and a load of mosquitoes, which means that people nearby may need to be protected.

This is a hard question to answer. One approach is prediction: using measurements of the environment, like rainfall and tide level, to estimate what the mosquito community will look like in a given region. The mosquito community determines what management actions, like spraying an insecticide, need to be taken, based on the threat it poses to public health.

We set out to explore how the way we use land (e.g. for residential areas or industrial areas) near urban mangroves affects the mosquito communities that live in those mangroves. The project involved dropping over retaining walls, slipping down banks, and tromping through muddy mangroves along the Parramatta River in Sydney. We set mosquito traps (billy cans of dry ice with a container on the bottom) and left them overnight to capture the mozzies when they are most active. We did this at two points in the summer, to see if there was any change over time.

We found that yes, the way we use land around a mangrove makes a difference. Mangroves with greater amounts of bushland and residential land in the surrounding area had fewer mosquitos, and fewer species of mosquitos. On the other hand, mangroves with greater amounts of industrial land surrounding them had a greater number of mosquito species, and those surrounded by greater amounts of mangrove had more mosquitos.

And, just to muddy the waters a bit more (pun intended), several of these relationships changed over time. These results show that although prediction based on the surrounding environment is a powerful technique for mangrove management, it is more complicated than we thought.

Another way forward: site-specific assessments

Our work suggests another way forward: site-specific assessments, measuring the mosquito community at a particular site in order to determine what management approaches need to be used. This is a daunting task; it requires a fair number of man-hours, and mangroves are not exactly an easy place to work. But it would be time well spent.

By assessing a site individually, managers can be confident that they are taking the best possible action for both the mangroves and the people nearby. It turns out that the best tool we have for striking a balance between environmental and public health concerns, the best tool we have for preserving and protecting, is information. In mangrove management—as in everything—knowledge is power.

Check out the abstract for our paper, Surrounding land use significantly influences adult mosquito abundance and species richness in urban mangroves, and follow the link to download from the journal, Wetlands Ecology and Management:

Mangroves harbor mosquitoes capable of transmitting human pathogens; consequently, urban mangrove management must strike a balance between conservation and minimizing public health risks. Land use may play a key role in shaping the mosquito community within urban mangroves through either species spillover or altering the abundance of mosquitoes associated with the mangrove. In this study, we explore the impact of land use within 500 m of urban mangroves on the abundance and diversity of adult mosquito populations. Carbon dioxide baited traps were used to sample host-seeking female mosquitoes around nine mangrove forest sites along the Parramatta River, Sydney, Australia. Specimens were identified to species and for each site, mosquito species abundance, species richness and diversity were calculated and were analyzed in linear mixed effects models. We found that the percentage of residential land and bushland in the surrounding area had a negative effect on mosquito abundance and species richness. Conversely, the amount of mangrove had a significant positive effect on mosquito abundance, and the amount of industrial land had a significant positive effect on species richness. These results demonstrate the need for site-specific investigations of mosquito communities associated with specific habitat types and the importance of considering surrounding land use in moderating local mosquito communities. A greater understanding of local land use and its influence on mosquito habitats could add substantially to the predictive power of disease risk models and assist local authorities develop policies for urban development and wetland rehabilitation.

Dr Suzi Claflin completed her PhD at Cornell University exploring environmental factors driving the spread of an aphid-borne potato virus on small-scale farms. She is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research in Hobart, TAS. In her spare time she runs her own blog, Direct Transmission, focusing on disease and other public health issues (check it out here). To learn more about her doctoral research, follow this link!